Godspeed, Goddard

Words have lost much of their impact these days. The word "extreme" was one of the first to go. At one time, it meant something serious or overpowering. Then it got taken over by marketers, truncated to "Xtreme" and applied to a flavor of Mountain Dew that absolutely nobody asked for.

"Epic" came in to fill the void left with the watering-down of "extreme", but it sadly fell to the hyperbolist hordes as well. It used to mean something like Beowulf and slaying dragons, then it went on to describing something very impressive like pulling off a 1200 on the drop from the helicopter on the drop to snowboard down the Matterhorn, but then in the span of about a week it went from that to celebrating the "epic achievement" of eating an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting. Dude, that's sooo epic!

"Passion" used to mean an intense, almost overwhelming desire. Now every unoriginal job seeker has "I'm passionate about synergistic cross-contextual gerbil herding" or some other such nonsense on their résumé. Let's be clear: I'm passionate about my wife; that means I love her intensely and I couldn't live without her. I'm passionate about flying: I love it intensely and I couldn't live without it (mainly because I'd starve, although at this point it might take a year or two). No one is "passionate" about gerbil herding; at best they might be vaguely interested in it and frankly not all that good at it.

The word "legend" gets thrown around in the same way, but in this case, Dick Goddard was an actual legend of the old school meaning. He passed away yesterday at the age of 89. Unless you're from the Cleveland, Ohio area, that probably doesn't mean a lot to you. Around Cleveland, though, he's a legend for many reasons.

First, he was a TV meteorologist in Cleveland for over 51 years, making his career longer than anyone—including the Weather Channel. His career was so long that when he was in college, weather satellites didn't even exist! The first successful weather satellite would launch a month before he graduated from Kent State in 1960. By the time he retired in late 2016, he had seen forecasting go from static, laboriously-crafted, hand-drawn paper maps to real-time interactive Ultra-HD animations.

Although he and I never met, he was a small ripple in the cosmic current that led to me becoming a pilot. When I was a child, there was no cable TV yet. Cities generally had their own NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliate stations plus a few truly local stations. The network affiliate stations played content provided by their affiliates most of the day, but there were several hours that the local station provided their own programming.

This included the local news. The news hour was much less bland, sterilized, and standardized than it is today. Every city had its own specific flavor to its journalism, and the nightly news teams themselves had different characters. TV personalities back then who delivered the news, sports, and weather weren't interchangeable, generic talking heads whose names you don't bother to remember because they'll only be around until someone cheaper graduates from broadcasting school, they were interesting individuals.

If you want to see a young George Carlin in a suit and tie give three examples of what I'm talking about (plus several mock commercials), watch this video. You can even see an early Al Sleet, before Carlin added one of his funniest lines ever ("Tonight's forecast: dark. Continued mostly dark tonight, turning to widely scattered light in the morning."):

Dick Goddard, even by those standards, had a clear personality. He was a sincere, direct, intelligent soul. Long before animal activism was a thing, at the end of his segment he would sometimes feature dogs, cats, or other animals that were in the local shelter looking for a forever home. (When Ohio recently implemented stronger anti-animal abuse laws, it named the bill "Goddard's Law".)

Other times, he would give mini-classes on air during his weather report. Sometimes it would be something as simple as explaining what an Alberta Clipper is while blaming it for the frigid cold to come. Or it could be simply explaining the difference between "partly cloudy" and "partly sunny". (Partly cloudy means more sun than clouds, and vice-versa. Pretty basic stuff, but I thought it was cool technical weather arcana back when I was 10 or so.) He not only loved the weather, he loved making you love it too. (A few years ago, I found a copy of his book Six Inches of Partly Cloudy: Cleveland's Legendary TV Meteorologist Takes on Everything--and More and devoured it in one day because his enthusiasm is still there.)

He helped kindle my life-long interest in the weather and a connection with what was going on up in the sky. Observing the atmosphere for so long made me want to swim in it, so it was inevitable that I would become a pilot someday. I didn't know when, and I didn't know how, but I knew that I would.

Even though we never met, he was a part of that. I'm sad that we never met because there was a yearly opportunity to do so. He created the Woollybear Festival, a one-day town fair in Vermilion, a pretty little place only about 15 minutes away from me. Each fall, I said I wanted to go, yet each year, when the day came, I said I'd do it next year instead. Now he won't be there next year except in our hearts and the chance to meet him is gone forever.

So do the thing you want to do while you can; see the people you want to spend time with now because there will inevitably come a day when you can't.

I'll close with this video that sums up the man and why he is such a legend in only two minutes:

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When being "stupid" is the smart thing to do

I have accomplished many things during my COVID-19 time off. The clutter is slowly going away (do I really need that book on Unix written in 1998?), I'm almost done with my project of reading all of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders, and my basement is looking better than ever. Soon I'll be able to get that home gym set up the way I've wanted it for years so I can skip workouts by not bothering to walk downstairs instead of not getting in the car to not drive to the gym.

However, getting a Ph.D. in epidemiology isn't one of the things I've done in the last 32 days. I don't expect doctors to tell me how to fly my plane, and I don't tell doctors how to do their job. As much as I miss flying (I had a dream the other night that we were going to restart service but due to the lower loads were going back to my old aircraft, the Dash-8), and as eager as I am for things to get back to normal, I'm willing to wait until that is safe to do. I know enough to know that I don't know enough to know when that is.

As an example of how something that seems simple actually has a lot going on behind the scenes and how those unseen things make a difference, I'd like to take the simple, routine flight we do from Syracuse to Newark.

It seems easy enough: a quick 169 nm flight southeast:

SYR-EWR as the crow flies, 169 nautical miles.

However, the way our flight plans are made, we first fly 35 nm southwest, then hang a hard left, then go southeast for about 120 nm, then make a hard right to go south-southwest again. Seems stupid, doesn't it?

SYR-EWR as a drunken crow would fly, 215 nautical miles.

If you don't take into account the complexities of getting all the other airplanes lined up into New York's airspace, you'd think that that's the most idiotic way of getting between those two points. You might think our dispatcher doesn't know what they're doing and they need to be fired. But the reason we do that is because we fly an orderly, prearranged arrival path that fits into the much bigger ATC system; in this case, it's called the FLOSI 4 RNAV Arrival.

In the bigger system, what seems stupid is really only a way of making things work the best we can. There are dozens and dozens of airplanes trying to use this little chunk of airspace all at the same time and if everyone did what worked for them without regard for anything else, it would be chaos. The ATC system would fall apart and no one would be able to use it.

Instead, we have procedures to put all of those ducks in a neat, orderly row. Those stems off the little tree above are almost guaranteed to not be the single most efficient way for any of the airplanes on that path—in fact, it lengthens our SYR flight from 169 nm to 215 nm. We have to go what seems a bit out of our way in order to get there at all. Sometimes, we have to go a bit backwards to go a long way forwards. And sometimes what seems like stupidity is simply understanding at an expert level instead of an amateur level.

One of the common themes Warren Buffett refers to in those letters to shareholders referred to above is the idea of remaining within one's circle of competence. He often gets asked why he doesn't invest in x, y, or z, and he just says that he doesn't know enough about those sectors to know whether or not those stocks are good investments. He is also famous for saying that the key to investing isn't to make brilliant decisions, it's to avoid making dumb ones. Remember, this is one of the best investors in history and one of the richest men ever to walk the planet, and even he is willing to admit there are things about investing he doesn't know enough about to have an opinion on.

Often, the most important thing you can know is how much you don't know. Just like fatigue is surprisingly hard to detect because the same brain that's too tired to make a smart call is the one that is supposed to make that call, not knowing how much you don't know leads to the infamous Dunning-Kruger Effect. As Mark Twain once said, it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

An old joke goes, what's the difference between a pilot and God? God doesn't think he's a pilot. In this case, I'm just going to twist an old Star Trek quote: Dammit, Jim, I'm a pilot, not a doctor. Stay safe by staying at home until you can stay safe without being at home.



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How to get better when you can't get better

One of the memes that went around recently was the pilot working from home:

While I can't fly an airplane right now, I am fortunate that I am senior enough at my airline that I was able to avoid getting furloughed. Instead, I'm sitting at home on long-call reserve, getting paid to hurry up and wait. If airline flying picks up, I might get called in to do some flying that gets added back. For April and May, I'd estimate the chance of that happening as about .01%.

Like many, I've been wildly successful in handling this bounty of extra time to do things and wildly unsuccessful as well. One of the problems with being off for at least two months is that it's so easy to say, "Ehh, I'll just do that tomorrow," because there are so many tomorrows on the calendar now. I've certainly frittered away a lot of time already as "I'll just watch one episode on Hulu" becomes five episodes.

Nonetheless, I have been able to catch up on some of the "I'll get around to that someday" things as well. One of those things is catching up on reading research papers. While reading the scintillatingly-titled "Higher Landing Accuracy in Expert Pilots is Associated with Lower Activity in the Caudate Nucleus", I came across this passage that stood out:

In terms of expertise, there were differences between the two groups in flight experience and age. As expected, more hours of total flight experience, overall t (12)  = 2.61, p<.05 and more hours of flight experience in the past month, t (11)  = 2.62, p<.001 were associated with higher expertise. In addition level of expertise was associated with younger age, t (18)  = −2.25, p = 0.045).

In other words, how many total hours you have and how old you are have approximately the same impact on how well you would do in this study, but what is even more important by a large margin is how many recent flight hours you have.

This is particularly relevant in a time of social distancing and flight schools/FBOs being closed to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. (If your flight school isn't closed right now, IT SHOULD BE.) It's not exactly Earth-shattering news that your skills get rusty; everyone knows that. What struck me about that passage is how much more of an impact currency had on task performance than any of the three significant factors (total hours, recent hours, and age).

This is not the place to get into detailed statistical theory, so I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible by comparing only the p-values. There are much more sophisticated ways of analyzing the data, but a p-value is one of the most basic: it attempts to measure the probability that the result came about by dumb luck. In general, less than a 5% chance is considered acceptable; this would be p < .05. The researchers' values for these three were

• Flight hours last month: p < .001
• Age (younger): p < .045
• Flight hours total: p < .05

By comparing p-values, current flight hours was 20x more important than total hours! [Again, if you're looking for a mathematically-rigorous statistical treatment, don't follow my example. I'm a pilot because I'm too dumb to be a statistician. This is just a way to demonstrate the impact.]



What's important to take from this is that while you're enduring a forced lay-off from flying, you need to be doing things to stay engaged with the cockpit to stave off rustiness. I'm certainly in favor of flight simulators: they are the most active way to practice and therefore will keep your skills sharper for longer.

In fact, if you use your time right, you can come out on the other side with skills you didn't have before, but in order to do this, you have to use the sim to do more than just replicate what you're doing now. As the saying goes, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses: things they're good at and things they're not good at. It's easy to practice the things you're already good at—after all, they're easy because you're good at them. What you need to do is figure out the things you're not good at and create scenarios in the sim that target those.

For example, let's say your home field is 5,000 feet long. Chances are you're not very good at short field landings then because you don't have to be. In that case, find a 1500-foot field and practice going into it. Since you're in a sim, there's no worry about bending metal: the only danger is a bruised ego the first time or two. Eventually, you'll think that 1500 feet is more runway than a 172 needs.

You'll find that the real benefit of this isn't just in being able to land at a short field. After all, in real life, you may still not have a short field near you to land at. However, you'll find that you've become a sharper pilot in other important ways that count every day. Your airspeed control will be much better because you can't add an extra 10 knots for the wife, 10 knots for the kids, 10 knots for the dog, and 10 knots just because. Your ability to gauge without looking at the altimeter whether you're too high or low will improve. Your feel for the relationship between power, pitch, and airspeed will improve. You'll develop better sensitivity for appropriate control/throttle inputs, and so on.

What's important is that you maintain what you have and use that as a base to build on. If you do it right, once you're able to climb back in the cockpit you'll have even more confidence than you did before!



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Taking the long way due to coronavirus

It's Sunday, March 22, 2020, and I'm fat, dumb, and happy in my seat 33,000 feet in the air. I'm staring aimlessly out the front window, enjoying a nice view of Norfolk and Virginia Beach off to my left as I leave a contrail over the East Coast, doing seven miles a minute from Washington-Dulles to Jacksonville, Florida.

Suddenly, I'm fat, dumb, and less happy as I hear ATC tell an aircraft that was going the other direction, to LaGuardia, to contact their dispatcher and file an alternate outside of New York Center's airspace. So many controllers had called out sick today that they were going to have to shut down a large section of New York airspace. I heard a phrase I'd never actually heard spoken on the radio before: New York Center was going "ATC zero".

This was a bit of a concern for me, as after we got to Jacksonville, we were going to be flying to Newark (also in NY airspace) half an hour later. One of the few good things about the collapse in air travel this month (on this last four-day trip, I flew less than 100 passengers combined in all four days!) is that fuel is no issue. With almost nobody on board, we can fill the tanks as much as we want and never have to worry about being too heavy.

So that's just what we did: we took about 30% more fuel than we needed in case we had to hold for a long time or had to go somewhere else. We got lucky: with the exception of a few S-turns to create additional spacing en route, we were able to make it to Newark as scheduled. The reduction in airplanes in the sky in general probably helped—after all, shutting down a lane on the freeway doesn't matter as much if no one is driving anyway.

After we got to Newark, all we had left was a quick flight up to Albany, NY for the night. Although due to the reduced staffing they were spacing takeoffs 8 minutes apart instead of the normal minute or less, on the way out there was only one aircraft ahead of us in line so we still made it out early.

However, the next morning, we were going from Albany to Dulles, and we did get impacted directly by the coronavirus-induced ATC staffing issues. A large section of the airspace was shut down: a chunk that we normally fly right through. However, instead of the direct route, we ended up going far to the west, all the way to central Pennsylvania, in order to avoid that closed sector before we turned toward the airport.

Taking the long way around NY's airspace.

This is what that same flight looked like a week before, when things were still relatively normal:

Just a week earlier, in more normal times.

Fortunately, again, since we were able to load up on gas because we had exactly 4 (yes, four!) passengers on board the entire aircraft, we ended up getting off the gate 10 minutes early and getting to Dulles on time.

I hope you and yours stay safe and stay in!



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I did it! (Revisiting a childhood favorite game)

When I was 12 years old, one of the most impressive simulation games ever to come out for the Commodore 64 was released: MicroProse's Gunship. I spent months and months and hundreds of hours flying missions in it, trying to get the game's highest award: the Congressional Medal of Honor. [Yes, I know it's actually just "Medal of Honor". The game refers to it as the Congressional Medal of Honor, so that's how I refer to it in this post.]

Winning the ultimate medal was actually secondary to just flying it and having fun flying. It was one of the hardest games ever on the Commodore because it wasn't a shoot 'em up; it was an actual simulation. It strove to pack as much realism as possible into a platform that had a 1 MHz processor (approximately 4000 times slower in raw clock speed than just one core of a 4 GHz 8-core processor) and 64 kilobytes (not megabytes, not gigabytes, kilobytes) of RAM, and it wasn't afraid to be complex and intimidating to learn. The graphics were very, very good for the time (1986), but nowadays the closest competition is Minecraft.

All those hours playing Gunship turned out to have a major impact on me learning to fly; not just in kindling my interest in it but in invisibly burning piloting concepts into my head without me realizing it. It simulated things like ground effect, translating vertical components of lift into horizontal ones in a bank (meaning if you wanted to lose altitude quickly, you could go into a tight turn), trading altitude for airspeed, and so on.

I came across a copy of it the other day and figured I'd spend a half hour or so revisiting it just to see if I could remember how to play. At first it was a little rough just remembering all the keys for the controls, but not long in, it came back to me. Although I hadn't played this game in over 30 years, once I got the hang of the controls again, I was actually better at it now than I was then!

In large part, that is because I have 6000 hours of flight time behind me now, whereas I hadn't even been in a small plane then. That actually helped a lot because my instrument scan is automatic now. It takes so little of my cognitive resources to keep track of what the aircraft is doing now that I was able to devote much more of my mental effort to devising strategies, carrying out assault tactics, and performing evasive maneuvers when those didn't work.

Way back when, I struggled like hell to get that Medal of Honor. Very few who played it managed to do it, but after hundreds of hours, finally, FINALLY, I managed to become one of the few who did. Of course, not knowing the criteria for receiving it made it even harder to get; I just took the approach of shooting everything that moved and never returning to base with ammo left over.

(Remember, this was long before the web had a hundred walkthroughs for every game, YouTube had a thousand playthroughs, and there was no Google to get you through the hard parts. Most games didn't even have paper strategy guides—and there was no GameStop or Amazon to buy one from even if there was one. It turns out that there actually was a book written about Gunship... which I found out 34 years later when researching Gunship medal criteria!)

As it turns out, that approach is pretty close to what it takes to get the CMOH anyway, but Richard Sheffield's Gunship Academy lays out the criteria:

The question most frequently asked of the game designers at MicroProse is "What the heck do I have to do to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor?" Well, it's really quite simple. All you have to do is

• Score 5000 points
• Complete both missions
• Shoot down at least two Hinds
• Get wounded
• Live and don't get captured
• And do all that in less than 22.5 minutes

What I had intended to be only a quick stroll down memory lane turned into me playing several missions in a row. After a few hours, I managed to do something that took me hundreds of hours back then: I actually won the Congressional Medal of Honor again!

The mission that won me my second Congressional Medal of Honor in Gunship, only 33 years or so after the first one.

The coveted medal in all its 8-bit glory.

Probably one of the reasons I had a hard time getting the medal back then was because I tried to avoid getting into dogfights with the enemy helicopters (the Russian Mi-24 Hind-D) because their cannon could tear you to pieces quickly and ruin the whole mission. If I encountered one after completing both objectives, I'd run back to base as fast as possible instead of engaging it. I didn't know that bagging a second one was a requirement because, well, no one knew that, least of all me.

One of the things the list above leaves out is that you have to have won a campaign ribbon from all four theaters first. There is some debate over whether you have to win all the lower medals first. All I can say is that I had a mission where I fulfilled all the criteria and I had all the medals, but I didn't have all the ribbons. (I skipped straight to the fourth theater because the first three were too easy.) I was not awarded the CMOH for that mission, but when I did receive it, it was for a mission with a lower score after I went back and picked up the first three campaign ribbons. You can see what I'm talking about below, where I didn't have the CMOH at 5460 points but did get it at 5190 later:

That's a full salad bar in Gunship.

That's a nice way to start a new year, and unlike Forrest Gump, I didn't have to get shot in the buttocks!



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A Lesson on Christmas

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. My dogs, Orion and Meissa (pronounced "MAY-suh"), certainly did.

Orion and Meissa. They're as opposite as they look.

Orion, the black/tri-color guy on the left with the serious look, is a Border Collie/Australian Shepherd mix. Meissa, the merle on the right with the goofy grin who is slightly blurry because she has a problem sitting still, is pure Australian Shepherd. I mentioned Orion in my post Turn the Page: The Downside of Being an Airline Pilot. Since I wrote that in 2017, we've added Meissa. (Basically, we got our dog a dog.)

Although they're the same breed, their personalities could hardly be more different. In fact, we call the pair "Pinky and the Brain" after the old Steven Spielberg cartoon, and one of the nicknames we have for Meissa is "Narf", which is one of Pinky's tag-lines.

Orion is a highly focused, very task-driven dog. Once he sets about doing something, he has to see it all the way to completion, and is very good at ignoring distractions until his task is done.

Meissa, on the other hand, is a much more happy-go-lucky dog. She's very intelligent in her own right, and learns tricks and other things very quickly, but she has the attention span of a hypercaffeinated gnat. This is even more ironic since Meissa is named after the star that forms the head of the constellation Orion.

A perfect example of how these personalities play out is their reaction if their ball bounces through the fence when we're playing. Orion will stand by the fence where it went out, point at it, look back worriedly, and won't budge until I rescue it. Meissa will run around in a circle once, then trot back to me as if to say, "Hey, that one's gone. You got another ball?"

However, this Christmas she showed the advantage of not being so focused that she gets locked into one solution. We got them both a ball that holds treats, so they could have fun trying to get one of their favorite dog biscuits out of it.

They both took quite a while to get their treat out of the ball. Surprisingly, although Orion is the "Brain" of our "Pinky and the Brain" double dog duo, Meissa managed to get hers out long before he did. In fact, I finally had to sneak him a little help when he wasn't looking so he'd think he finally did it on his own.

They both initially tried pinning the ball against the wall and trying to push against it hard enough to be able to get the biscuit in their jaws. Unfortunately for them, the ball was slightly too big for this to work.

However, in this case, Meissa's lack of an attention span worked in her favor. After a while, it meant that she got bored with that approach and moved on to a different one. When that didn't work, she tried another different thing. Then another, and another, and so on. Finally she hit on the idea of holding the ball between her paws while lying on her back and letting gravity help her out as she chewed on it from the bottom. That let her break the biscuit into chunks that were small enough to fall out. Success!

Orion, on the other hand, stuck with the first approach and kept trying it over and over again. He had the determination, but his focus led him down a tunnel that wasn't ever going to lead to his objective. His failure wasn't due to lack of brains—he's one of the smartest dogs I've ever seen—but ironically because of one of his best qualities: his "stick-to-it-iveness".

Unfortunately, this trait is often seen in pilots who have accidents. The long chain of causes isn't linked together by someone who sets out to have an accident: it's often put together by an unintentional, unfortunate perseverance. The "accomplish the mission" mindset common in pilots is usually a good thing: after all, people who aren't willing to put in time, study, effort, and financial commitment don't accomplish the goal of becoming a pilot in the first place.

However, sometimes things aren't going the way they should and a solution is needed. Sometimes the solution is not flying in the first place. This is a hard choice to make when you're trying to make it somewhere for a business meeting or a family gathering or getting back home after a nice vacation and conditions at your destination are above your skill and/or equipment level. This often leads to "get-home-itis", and can be deadly. The AOPA Air Safety Institute's case study called "In Too Deep" is a perfect example of this scenario:

Another good example like that one is another AOPA ASI case study called "Cross-County Crisis":

In many ways, I have it easier as an airline pilot in these situations than general aviation pilots do: I fly a strictly-maintained, multi-engine turbine aircraft with good IFR equipment and ice protection in well-structured, controlled environments. If the weather is too bad for the plane I fly to handle, the no-go decision has probably already been made for me. In the remaining handful of cases where it's iffy, I have chosen to wait an hour or so to see if it clears up or passes through and that decision has never been questioned, but in most cases I've never even been given the chance to try to press on: the cancellation has already been made by that point.

That doesn't mean that airline pilots aren't immune to the danger of overly focusing on one solution to the exclusion of all others: Air France 447 is an example of my saying, "If what you're doing isn't working, doing more of it isn't going to work either."



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"A much unsung hero of the Apollo Program"

In case you missed it (you were living on the moon, you fell into the Kola Superdeep Borehole and had to climb out, your shady travel agent sold you a fabulous spelunking excursion at the Great Pit of Carkoon, or you somehow managed to be completely disconnected from civilization for the month of July), we Earthlings celebrated the 50th anniversary of stomping on the moon's face this month.

It's easy enough to practice touch-and-goes on the Earth: just show up at the airport with some cash burning a hole in your pocket and they'll let you turn that into burning avgas instead.

But what if you're an astronaut? Obviously you can't rent a lunar trainer from the FBO. In that case, NASA designed an apparatus designed to simulate lunar landings. In the video below from the Smithsonian Channel, you can watch Neil Armstrong have to use the 1960s equivalent of the Cirrus CAPS parachute system as the trainer has a malfunction and Armstrong ejects.

Although the video doesn't say why the trainer went out of control, a NASA page about it says that "a loss of helium pressure caused depletion of the hydrogen peroxide used for the reserve attitude thrusters." Basically, it would be like losing the brakes in your car: once you start going in one direction, nothing is going to stop you. Time to use your ejector seat.

NASA then goes on to quote Armstrong:

"(The LM) Eagle flew very much like the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle which I had flown more than 30 times….  I had made from 50 to 60 landings in the trainer, and the final trajectory I flew to the landing was very much like those flown in practice. That of course gave me a good deal of confidence – a comfortable familiarity."  Summarizing its usefulness to the Apollo training program, Armstrong said:  "It was a contrary machine, and a risky machine, but a very useful one."  All prime and backup Moon landing commanders completed training in the LLTV, and those who landed a LM on the Moon attributed their success to this training.

One final quote sums up how there is no substitute for being able to practice: "Dubbed the 'flying bedstead,' the ungainly contraption is 'a much unsung hero of the Apollo Program,' according to Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders."


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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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FaceApp and the breaking of the OODA loop

One would think that the Cambridge Analytica scandal would be fresh in the minds of the public, since it was only four months ago (March 2019) that it broke. In case four months ago is ancient history to you, the scandal was that an innocent-looking app, "This is Your Digital Life", collected data about users that were used for nefarious purposes.

However, the popularity of FaceApp, a Facebook application that does an admirable job projecting what you will look like when you are old (or younger, or a different gender, etc.), makes it obvious that millions and millions of people learned nothing at all from the revelations of a mere four months ago.

Top Gun meets FaceApp. Credit: no idea

To what should be the surprise of no one who paid attention to Cambridge Analytica, FaceApp isn't just changing your picture: it's collecting it for whatever use they decide to put it to.

One of the more popular psychological models in aviation is the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. In short, you see something, figure out one or more ways to react, decide which one to do, then do it.

The important part is that the OODA loop is a loop. That means that once you've acted, you observe what impact your actions had and start the loop again. The Wikipedia entry for praxis breaks down these post-act steps even further:

• Taking the action
• Considering the impacts of the action
• Analyzing the results of the action by reflecting upon it
• Altering and revising conceptions and planning following reflection
• Implementing these plans in further actions

That's a long-winded way of saying, "After you do something, see if what you did worked. Learn from it either way." If you don't do both, you break the loop. Your powerful "OODA loop" flops uselessly into a limp, wet "OODA noodle". An ooda nooda.

An example of what the OODA Noodle gives you comes from an experience I had this spring. So there I was, flying an approach. The winds are howling out of the west, stirred up and irritated by their passage across the Blue Ridge mountains, and are almost a direct crosswind, 25 knots gusting to 40. Suddenly, at about 300 feet above the ground, I experience a 30-knot gain of airspeed: in other words, some pretty bad wind shear.

Hope is a bad plan in an airplane, so I'm not going to sit there and hope this turns out okay anyway. I push the thrust levers forward and begin the standard go-around procedure. ATC gives us an altitude to climb to and a heading to turn to, and I'm steering the plane that direction, hand-flying it all the way.

As my First Officer changes the navigation source, we get a caution chime and the yellow blinking light on the panel illuminates. Since I'm not expecting a caution at that point in the flight, I look to the screen and see a "LATERAL MODE OFF" caution message. No big deal; with this plane, if you enter the navigation mode and then change the navigation source, it turns off the mode.

This makes sense, because it doesn't know what mode you want with the new source. That message is the flight guidance computer's way of saying, "You told me to do something, but you didn't tell me what that something is." In that case, it will put the flight director in roll mode. It doesn't know what to do, so it reverts to leveling the wings until you make up your mind. That's a logical choice by the engineers who designed the system: if you don't know what to do, don't do anything stupid.

My First Officer cancels the caution and continues doing stuff. I naturally figure that one of the things he's going to do is to fix the navigation mode, but he completely ignores the message. When it becomes obvious that he skipped the end part of the OODA loop (in other words, he never took the time to see what impact his cancelling of the caution had), I ask him to put me in heading mode so my flight director will match where I'm actually pointing the plane.

In the meantime, since we were the second plane in a row to have to go around because of wind shear, ATC switches runways and starts using the one pointing into the wind. We land uneventfully the second time around and the flight becomes just another line in the logbook.

I have my own "enhanced" OODA loop, which means that the flight isn't over once it's in the logbook. I spin one last time through the loop as I think about the flight afterward, using the praxis steps above in a post-flight analysis and reflection. I think about how what I did turned out, how it might have turned out had I done something else, and come up with things to learn from and/or do better in the future.

As I said in my previous post, "flying is a constant three-dimensional puzzle that you have to continuously be solving." Once you're done with solving that particular flight, you can use that solution as a basis for solving future flights. In some ways, OODA and the WOPR from the classic movie Wargames have something in common:

When pilots don't do this, they repeat mistakes over and over again. When people don't do this, they fall for two scams in less than a year. That makes as much sense as being beaten with a wet noodle.



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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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Pilots and Artists

One of the parts of the description of this blog back before I had condensed it into two sentences was that it is an "explanation of the art of flying." By that use of the word "art" I was referring to the more colloquial sense in how we sometimes refer to someone who excels in something as "turning it into an art form."

Nonetheless, this week I came across an article that briefly examines the neurobiology of art: what effect does art have on the brain, and why is art important to what it means to be human? While many artistic things have been said about flying, I was struck with the connection flying has with art here:

[P]aintings by Seurat or Mondrian stimulate an area of the brain that also derives joy from solving puzzles for pleasure.... The idea is that multiple areas of the brain cooperate to solve this "puzzle" of art that, as a result, creates a feeling of satisfaction. When this is happening, there are distinct areas in the frontal lobe that interact and bring together "memory, experience, [and] learning."

In some ways, what I enjoy most about flying is that it is a constant three-dimensional puzzle that you have to continuously be solving. Your brain has to construct a mental map of where you are in relation to multiple factors at the same time: weather, other airplanes, airports, terrain, fuel, engine condition, and so on, and it has to solve them into one flight path.

Even with the autopilot on, you still have to do this, since you have to know if what you told the autopilot to do is what you really need it to be doing. I find this challenge immensely enjoyable, and one of the things about it is that you don't just solve it once and be done with it: you have to update your solution to that puzzle moment after moment.

This constant puzzle solving is a form of search for truth and beauty in the laws of physics. One of the rewarding things about it is that you have immediate feedback: if you do the wrong thing in an airplane, you'll know about it. This constant process of path prediction is a search for what's constant in a world that is anything but constant.

That is why if you replace "function of art" with "purpose of a pilot" in the following sentence, the thread that connects "flying", "art", and "the art of flying" becomes clear: "I shall therefore define the function of art as being a search for constancies, which is also one of the most fundamental functions of the brain. The function of art is therefore an extension of the function of the brain—the seeking of knowledge in an ever changing world."

In other words, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said, "I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things." I would add to the end of that, "It turns the tyranny of petty things into a litany of pretty things." The mundane becomes the sublime; the pointless becomes the poignant.

Art is sometimes described as an attempt to make sense of the world. Socrates, a man who never flew because he was born over two thousand years too early, said that we can do the same thing through flying: "Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives."


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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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I'm great. I said so myself!

I was recently reminded the other day of a somewhat oddball question that I've been asked more than once. This won't be the last time I come across it, and the answer is a little bit complicated.

The question is, "Can I endorse myself for knowledge tests?"

The answer is, "It depends. And even if so, it depends."

The answer is actually pretty clear if you are a CFI and don't hold a ground instructor certificate. In that case, the answer is NO. The FARs are pretty clear on this under Part 61 Subpart H:

§61.195   Flight instructor limitations and qualifications

3(i) Prohibition against self-endorsements. A flight instructor shall not make any self-endorsement for a certificate, rating, flight review, authorization, operating privilege, practical test, or knowledge test that is required by this part.

Things get murkier if you hold a Ground Instructor (either Advanced or Basic) certificate. In that case, there is no prohibition under the ground instructor part of the FARs (Part 61 Subpart I) against self-endorsement. There's nothing that says you can, but there's nothing that says you can't, either. With the way the United States legal system works, that technically means you can.

However, the other "it depends" part is dependent on your testing provider actually accepting your self-endorsement as an BGI, AGI, or IGI. Which of those you're even able to self-endorse for depends on what ground instructor certificate you have:

• If you have a BGI, you can't self-endorse for anything except a Sport, Recreational, or Private certificate.
• With an AGI, you still can't self-endorse for an instrument written—that requires an IGI.
• And if you have only an IGI (i.e., no BGI/AGI), the only thing you can self-endorse for is your instrument written.

If you're unclear on the difference between an BGI and an AGI or what you can do as an IGI, the most popular post on this entire blog goes into that.

As always, if you have questions, I love to hear them. Please ask away!



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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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POH vs. AFM vs. PIM vs. AIM: What's the difference?

As a student pilot, most flight schools will require you to obtain a copy of your aircraft's POH to study from, right? Well, actually, no.

They will almost certainly require you to acquire a copy of the PIM or AIM, although nowadays you can probably just download a free copy from the Internet. Cessna provides their PIMs online for free, so you won't even be violating copyright laws if you do.

First, let's expand some initialisms:

• POH: Pilot's Operating Handbook
• AFM: Airplane Flight Manual
• AIM: Airplane Information Manual
• PIM: Pilot's Information Manual

The terms are often used interchangeably, and often POH is used for almost everything. In everyday use, this isn't a big issue because they have almost the same information. The PIM for a Cessna 172 looks almost identical to the POH, with the biggest difference being that generic weight and balance numbers are used in the PIM, but the POH has the actual, measured weight for that particular 172.

The ever-trusty Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (the "P-hack") summarizes it nicely in Chapter 9:

While the AFM/POH may appear similar for the same make and model of aircraft, each manual is unique and contains specific information about a particular aircraft, such as the equipment installed and weight and balance information. Manufacturers are required to include the serial number and registration on the title page to identify the aircraft to which the manual belongs. If a manual does not indicate a specific aircraft registration and serial number, it is limited to general study purposes only.

The only way you'll buy a copy of the POH is to buy the whole aircraft itself, because the POH is basically a PIM or AIM that is created specifically for that single aircraft. It is provided for that one airplane and that one only. It contains information specific to that aircraft, and it is the only one that satisfies the ARROW requirements. (The POH has the "O" for Operating Limitations contained in it.)

From FAA publication 8083-19a, which you can download for free here.

For that reason, when I had a student that was about to take a checkride, I'd check to make sure the POH was on board, and when doing general ground training, I would not use the POH itself; in that case, I would use an AIM or PIM. The POH is too difficult and costly to replace, so it was never to leave the aircraft without a very good reason. (AIMs or PIMs can be ordered by the dozen from aviation suppliers; the POH can only be replaced by the manufacturer and has to be approved by the FAA.)

I've been talking a lot about the POH, but what about the AFM? Well, the AFM and the POH are almost synonyms. The difference is that AFM is the older term for older manuals. The FAA didn't standardize the format and the terminology until 1975. After that time, the term changed to POH. That's why in the PHAK quote above, they use "AFM/POH".

Clear as mud now?


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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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